WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND ITS MONUMENTS. 
Nn 
5 
its origin was almost accidental, and its growth has been both 
slow and gradual. Such a notion would have been quite incon- 
sistent with medizeval ideas on the subject of burial. The leading 
motive which would induce Edward the Confessor, or Henry III., 
or Henry VII., or any of their contemporaries, to build a chapel 
in which their remains and shrines should be placed after their 
death, was to secure a place for an altar at which masses might 
continue to be said for the repose of their souls. They never 
thought of making the edifices they founded receptacles for the 
bodies or memorials of others than themselves and their own 
immediate relatives. Only by very slow degrees did others than 
those of the royal house, and the abbots, obtain interment in the 
church. Up to the time of the Reformation, sepulture in the 
Abbey was confined to members of the royal family, distinguished 
courtiers and royal favourites, and abbots. The immediate effect 
of the Reformation appears to have been a reduction in the 
number of burials in the Abbey, though in 1551 a monument was 
erected to the memory of Geoffrey Chaucer. It should, however, 
be remarked that he owed the honour of his burial here, one 
hundred and fifty years previously, not to his merits as a poet, 
but to the posts which he held at the court of Richard II., and to 
his connexion through his wife with the royal house of Lancaster, 
But in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the number of burials was 
enormously increased, and the chapels at the east end, no longer 
used as places of worship, became simply receptacles of tombs 
and monuments. On the sites of the ancient altars, vast monu- 
ments—I am inclined to say ‘ monstrous” monuments, using 
the word ‘‘ monstrous” in more than one sense—were erected to 
the memory of persons who had little claim to the honour. For 
some generations after this, burial in the chapels was mainly con- 
fined to great statesmen, lawyers, soldiers, and their families, but 
in 1599 Spenser was buried in the south transept near the grave 
and monument of Chaucer, expressly as a tribute to his fame as a 
poet, and during the succeeding forty years many other poets and 
men of letters were similarly honoured. To George Villiers, 
Duke of Buckingham, Charles I. assigned a small chapel to the 
